“Indeed, art makes us see the world differently, and having seen the world that way, we go back and see the art
differently.
— Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock
“No, Jason,” I told him. “It’s not that I don’t ‘get’ it. It’s more that what I ‘get’ doesn’t interest me.”
My younger brother shook his head. “Oh come on, Alicia! If you’d just read the curator’s notes you’d understand ... .”
“I did read the notes,” I lied, interrupting him. I had, in fact, leaned over to try and read the notes, or at least the title of the sculpture. Which was, of course, “Untitled.” But the further notes, which might or might not have let me “get” the piece, were in a type size reminiscent of a telephone book listing, they were mounted on the wall next to the piece at roughly hip level, and the lighting in the gallery now that it was getting dark out was somewhat less than adequate. I would have had to get down on my knees to read the curator’s notes, and at my age, getting down would have been difficult enough and the effort required for getting up again might well have been somewhat embarrassing. And, frankly, the piece of so-called art in question was not interesting enough to me to warrant any such effort. It consisted of a mismatched pair of old shoes, tied together by their laces and hung over a wooden structure that resembled nothing so much as a pile of pruned tree branches waiting to be run through a chipper for mulch. When, I wondered, had art come to demand such exertion, intellectual and physical, on the part of a viewer to make any sense? And why?
Despite his comment about the notes, I doubted that in this case Jason had read them either. He is a bit more than ten years younger than I am, so perhaps his eyesight was better, but he hadn’t done more than glance at the label with its several hundred words of explication. Although he might have understood it better than I would if he had. From the ones I had bothered reading earlier, I suspected it would place this sculpture in a context of some art movement I’d never heard of.
I’d been pleased when my kid brother had called to suggest that my husband Mark and I come into the city to go out to dinner with him and his wife Kate. It was to be my birthday present. And he’d said we should come early and they’d take us for a walk on the Highline and we’d tour some galleries in Chelsea, and then go eat at the trendy restaurant where he and Kate had had such an amazing meal the week before. But this gallery visit was turning out to be an exercise in frustration, making me feel stupid and stodgy.
So there we were, standing together in this display of some kind of art called “Assemblages” while my stomach growled because our dinner reservations were for a fashionable hour. Jason works for a media company that publishes “life style” magazines and websites, and though he’s in the finance department, not the content division, he makes an effort to keep up to date on current trends. I’ve never been sure if this is in the interests of his career, his ego, or if he genuinely likes all this stuff he claims to like. Maybe all three. At any rate, he claimed to like this sculpture.
“Of course,” he said, “Not everyone appreciates avant-garde art.”
“I do like this other one,” I told him, somewhat defensively, returning to a piece we’d looked at a few minutes earlier. A woman and infant had been painstakingly assembled from odd bits of baby equipment: bottles, toys, pacifiers, even a car seat.
“You would,” Jason said.
“What does that mean?” I demanded, suspecting that was a put-down.
“Nothing,” he assured me, a bit defensive in his turn. “It’s just that it’s, well, less
demanding. More representational.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, having come up behind us without either of us having noticed.
She slid her arm through her husband’s and contemplated the piece. “It’s sort of an ironic comment on how our modern society turns such a basic human experience into an excuse for rampant consumerism. Don’t you agree, Alicia?
I had, in truth, simply thought the statue was clever, but at this point in the conversation I wasn’t about to admit that. “Well, yes,” I said. “But you could also see it as an acknowledgment of how complex a state of being motherhood is, how many aspects it encompasses.” I can bullshit with the best of them when I put my mind to it.
“I see what you mean,” Kate agreed. “I especially like how the artist uses the car seat as the mother’s lower torso, as if in giving birth and putting her infant in a car seat, the mother is moving the child from one protective womb to another.” She let go of Jason’s arm and leaned over to read the label for this one. I was a bit relieved to see that she, who is some five years younger than my ten-years-younger brother, also had trouble with the signage. “Madonna and Child,” she read, “by an artist named Nicole Santana. I might have guessed it was by a woman.”
Jason glanced at the photocopied sheet he’d picked up at the gallery entrance. “I think she has another piece here too,” he said, and wandered off in search of it.
Kate detained me with a touch on my arm. “Was Jason being pompous?” she asked.
“Not at all,” I lied. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, you know how he gets all enthused about stuff. He took a course on contemporary
art last year and now he thinks he knows everything.”
I had no intention of discussing my brother’s character with his wife so I just shrugged
and said, “It would be hard to know less about this stuff than I do.”
“Me too,” she said. “And he can be insightful. But he does go on a bit at times.” She
turned to look for Jason and found him with Mark in front of another sculpture, pointing out some detail and lecturing. He did seem, however, to have gotten Mark interested. I can usually tell when my husband is faking it to be polite, so I felt no need to go rescue him. “You want to go look for the other piece by this Santana?” I asked.
Knowing the style of art we were looking for, it didn’t take us long to spot what we wanted, another assembled sculpture, this one a reclining nude, an odalisque according to the label, constructed of lace and knives.
“Now this one,” Kate said, “could have been made by a male artist.”
“Meaning that’s how they see us?” I asked, “Frills and danger?”
“I was thinking lingerie and cooking myself,” Kate replied.
“Sex, food, and motherhood.” I nodded. “That would seem to cover the views of some
men. Speaking of food, is it almost time to go eat? I’m starving.”
Kate glanced at her watch. “Close enough. Shall we go collect our husbands?”
We found them in front of the same sculpture they’d been looking at before, but now they were talking about football. So, art having been exhausted as a topic of conversation, we headed out to the chic new restaurant Jason had selected.
I have to admit that the food was, in fact, very good. The menu writer, however, seemed to think the food required as much explanation as contemporary art. Every cut of meat, every leaf of a vegetable had its origin listed. I was obviously supposed to know and care how Waystead Acres grew their kale and what Henderson’s Farm fed their chickens.
“I’m surprised they didn’t tell me what my salmon ate for dinner the night before it was caught,” I commented to Mark as we settled into our seats on the Long Island Railroad for the trip home.
“Well, since it was wild salmon,” he said, “there’s no way they could have known.”
“They could have autopsied it.” I suggested.
“Now my steak was grass fed,” he told me. “The menu did say that. And what breed of
cattle. But since I wouldn’t know one breed from another if they’d paraded several of them live in front of the table, I don’t remember what this one was.”
“Food was pretty good though,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t disagree. “And the art was interesting.”
“Yeah,” Mark agreed. “I think I liked the Highline better than the gallery, but even that was OK. Was it a good birthday?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it did make me feel old. Going out with Jason and Kate often makes me feel old. Or out of touch. Or something.”
Mark shrugged. “Well, he is your younger brother.”
“I know. But Adam never makes me feel old. And he’s what, seven years younger than me, instead of ten. Not that different.”
“Adam’s been a little old man as long as I’ve known him, and he would have been, what, eighteen when we started dating?”
“Seventeen I think.”
Mark laughed. “So Adam’s acted like he was in his fifties since back when he was in his teens, and Jason’s still trying to act like he’s in his twenties. And you, my love, are ageless.” And he leaned over to give me a kiss.
“Thank you,” I said as I leaned back and closed my eyes and thought about the way the day had made me feel. Was I getting too old to learn to like new things? Was it a symptom of approaching senility that art of old shoes and scrap wood seemed stupid to me? Or was it just that every birthday since forty had made me feel ancient?
So before I went into bed that night I spent half an hour poking around on Amazon, looking for a book on contemporary art that would make me feel less of a senile old fogey the next time the subject came up with Jason. But I ended up ordering a biography of Picasso instead. I suspected his innovations in art were too far in the past to impress my brother, but Picasso did stand at the point in art history where I started to feel lost. So I ordered a biography of Picasso and a new anti-wrinkle cream.
That might have been the end of the matter if not for the fact that, once I’d read the book on Picasso, I was left with a desire to see some of the paintings it talked about in person, rather than in a tiny color plate reproduction. Mark, however, wasn’t particularly interested. So a couple of weeks later, when he was heading out on a Saturday to play a round of golf with a coworker, I said over breakfast, “I was kind of thinking of taking the train into the city today, while you’re busy with Dick.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mark said. “Going shopping?”
“Window shopping,” I said. “Maybe stop into a museum.”
“Well, have fun. Is there more coffee?”
So I was by myself when, a few hours later, I stood in front of “Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon.” By myself, but hardly alone. I had been to the Museum of Modern Art before, a number of times over the years in fact, but not for a while. It was a bit of a nasty shock to find how crowded it was on a Saturday, how long the line was to buy my ticket, and how expensive the tickets had become. If the place had been less zoo-y I might have simply wandered around looking for what I wanted to see, but as it was I asked at one of the information desks, and the exact room I wanted was pointed out to me on a museum map by a helpful volunteer. I had seen the painting years before, and I had seen the reproduction in the book the week before, but neither the memory nor the three-inch reproduction had quite the impact of the actual thing.
Four nude women stood in a line, flaunting themselves, while a fifth crouched in front of the one on the right. The painting was so large they were just about life-size but they weren’t lifelike. Picasso was quite capable of perspective and of figures modeled to look three dimensional; I had only to turn a bit to my right to see an example of that, a lovely pastel-toned painting of a nude boy leading a horse. But these women were almost flattened, angular, and still pushed so far forward in the picture space that they nearly popped off the canvas. The two on the right, the last standing figure and the crouching one, had inhuman faces.
Now I knew from the book I’d read that Picasso was interested in African art at the time this painting was created, so that those two could be seen as women wearing masks, or maybe as some sort of sculpture-human hybrid. Indeed, the angularity of all the women seemed reminiscent of the African sculptures that had been reproduced in the book. But the effect was still unsettling. Which was quite possibly what Picasso had intended, something totally new, never seen before.
I couldn’t decide if I liked it. I stared at the painting, and the center two standing women stared right back, challenging me.
It’s a famous painting though. As I stood there for several minutes, three young people took selfies in front of it and one father photographed his little girls in front of it. The older one struck the pose of one of the figures and the father laughed. I wondered if he knew the women were supposed to be prostitutes, that Picasso’s original title for the piece had been “The Brothel.”
Then a tour group came, about a dozen people following a guide, jostling me even more than the selfie takers had. I might have stepped back and eavesdropped but it turned out the tour wasn’t in English, so I wandered off to look at other art.
It was maybe fifteen minutes later, while I was standing in front of the Matisse, that I heard my name called.
Matisse’s dancers had caught my attention at least in part because I’d been looking at Picasso’s demoiselles a few minutes earlier. This canvas was even larger and it too featured five nude women, simplified and flat as Picasso’s, but curvaceously boneless rather than angular. And rather than lining up and confronting the viewer, these ladies had linked hands in a circle to dance. Well, had tried to form a circle and dance. The one at the lower right seemed to have missed both her footing and her grip on the hand of the dancer to her left. I was considering the tension generated by that small gap between outstretched hands when I heard someone call, “Alicia!”
Now Alicia is not a particularly uncommon name, and I had no expectation of running into anyone I knew at the museum, so I paid no attention at first. But then someone repeated “Alicia!” more insistently, closer to my elbow, and I recognized the voice. I turned to find Jason behind me, trailed by Kate, both smiling broadly.
“Jason!” I said, surprised.
He laughed. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking at art,” I said, somewhat defensively. “What else would I be doing here?”
“Is Mark with you?” he asked.
“No. He had a golf date with a friend. I had the day to myself, so here I am.”
“Well, this is an unexpected pleasure. How are you?”
I felt a twinge of displeasure at that. Why should it be unexpected to run into me in a
museum? “Where would you expect to see me?” I asked.
Maybe I sounded a bit hostile because he seemed taken aback by my question. “I, um, I
didn’t think you came into the city much,” he said. “Right, Kate?”
She sort of shrugged and simply said, “It is indeed a pleasure.”
“I was here two weeks ago,” I told him. “Well, not here here. Down in Chelsea. With
you.”
“Art twice in one month,” he said. “Must be a record.”
“We’re not totally uncivilized out on Long Island,” I blurted, knowing that sounded dumb
even as the words came out of my mouth.
He must have realized his previous remark had also sounded dumb. “I didn’t mean ... .
Forget it.”
That left nothing either of us could say without sounding childish so I turned back to the painting. He, however, couldn’t quite let it go. “Really,” he said, “I didn’t mean anything.”
“Ok,” I said, but without looking at him.
As was not uncommon, it was Kate to step into the awkward silence. “Is this a favorite?” she asked, gesturing at the circle of dancers.
Glad to change the subject, I replied, “Not especially. But I was reading this book on Picasso, and it talked about how he and Matisse knew each other, saw each other as rivals. And you know how the reproductions in art books are so tiny? So I came into the city to look at the actual paintings.” And then, once I’d shut my mouth, I wondered if I’d sounded as pretentious as Jason had in the gallery in Chelsea two weeks before.
If I did, Jason didn’t take offense at it. He just nodded thoughtfully and said, “Interesting. I didn’t realize they knew each other.”
“Which Picasso were you comparing it to?” Kate asked.
I hadn’t been consciously comparing it to anything, at least not until I’d felt compelled to try and impress my brother, but I led the way back to the demoiselles. The tour group that had driven me off earlier had long since moved on, and the three of us stood contemplating the Picasso in silence for a moment before Jason commented.
“Well,” he said, “they’re both large paintings of nude women. And they’re both kind of stylized.”
“I like the other one better,” Kate said. “This one’s sort of ... I’m not sure how to put it ... sort of harsher.”
“They’re supposed to be prostitutes,” I told her, “offering themselves to clients.”
“Can’t say I’d be inclined to hire any of them,” Jason said, obviously without thinking. Kate and I both turned from the painting to look at him, and Kate made a sound at the back of her throat, not exactly a word but a grunt that spoke volumes about her reaction to the idea of her husband hiring a prostitute. Not happy volumes either, I thought.
“Not,” Jason hastened to add, “that I’d hire any prostitute. I’m just saying, they’re not very attractive. To me. I don’t know about Picasso.”
“You’re just a fountain of tact today,” Kate said.
“Yeah. I’d better shut my mouth. As soon as I manage to extract my foot from it.”
Intending to let the spouses hash this one out themselves, I stepped over to take another look at the boy leading the horse. Kate, however, followed me, apparently having nothing more to say to Jason on the subjects of prostitutes and tact. “Did you see the contemporary exhibit yet, the one on the second floor?” she asked.
“No. I really just came to look at these, after reading that book.”
“Well, you might want to take a look if you have time. There’s another piece by that artist we both liked at the gallery the other time.”
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll head down now. Second floor you said?”
Jason rejoined us at that moment. “You’ll come to lunch with us, won’t you?”
I knew that tone. He was trying to make nice. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to placate
me, Kate, or both of us, but I’d really had quite enough of my baby brother for the day. “Can’t,” I lied. “I’d miss my train home. You know how it is for us suburban types, life by the LIRR timetable.” And I made my good-byes and my escape.
I did take the time to look for the Santana piece Kate had mentioned though. It was another of those assembled sculptures, three female figures constructed from kitchen equipment, spoon heads with steel wool hair, fork hands, and funnel skirts. They were gathered around an oversized china teacup, painted with violets and sitting on top of a can of Sterno. I leaned over to look into the cup and a doll’s blue glass eye stared back at me. The piece was called “Waiting for Macbeth,” and I startled three Japanese tourists by laughing out loud.
As it happened, I didn’t see Jason and Kate again for several weeks. Mark and I, along with our grown kids, were going to spend Christmas with Mark’s widowed mother in Fort Lauderdale. I can’t say that would have been my first choice of a holiday destination, but I accepted that it was appropriate. Neither of my parents was still alive and one of Mark’s was. I did want to have some sort of holiday get-together with my own family, though, so I invited both brothers and their wives to dinner on the Saturday before we had to leave.
After the ham and the bûche de noel we settled into the living room to exchange gifts, the usual assortment of scarves, books, and alcohol. Jason and Kate had bought me a large glossy book of Matisse reproductions.
I guess my thank you didn’t sound as enthusiastic as Jason had hoped. “I figured you must like him ‘cause you were in front of one of his paintings that time we ran into you.” Which of course meant that Adam and his wife,Terry, had to be filled in on our chance encounter at MoMA.
“Did you like that exhibit a couple of years ago of his cutouts?” Jason asked me.
“I missed that one,” I said, wondering if he was trying to show me up.
“That’s a shame,” Terry said innocently. “I made a special trip to see it. You would have
loved it.”
I opened the book in my lap, flipped a couple of pages. “Oh well,” I said, “at least I can
look at his stuff here.”
Mark realized I’d been annoyed by the comments although I didn’t think — I certainly
hoped — no one else did. He hastened to change the subject, picking up the bottle of cognac he’d just unwrapped. “Anyone for a taste of this?”
“I’ll get the glasses,” I said, getting quickly to my feet and placing the book on the coffee table.
Mark put the bottle down and started to get up as well but Kate forestalled him. “I’ll give a hand,” she said and trailed me into the kitchen.
I pulled open the cupboard of glasses and stared at the top shelf. “I’m pretty sure we have actual brandy snifters but I’m not sure where they are. Haven’t used them in a while.”
I pulled a chair over, climbed up, and began to slide the rarely used stuff around. Kate came to stand next to me, ready to take the glasses when I was ready to hand them down. For a moment there was no sound except the clink of glasses and the soft hum of the conversations from the other room.
“There they are,” I said then. “All the way in the back. Wouldn’t you know? Here, can you take these?” And I passed Kate two champagne flutes. She placed them on the counter and then said, “Oh, before I forget. Again.” And as I went to hand her another flute I saw her reach into her trouser pocket and pull out two small rectangles of heavy paper, about the size of a credit card. She put them down next to the first two flutes and took the next from my hand. “I meant to tuck them into the book before I wrapped it but you know me. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t stuck to my shoulders.”
“What are they?” I asked as I shoved a beer stein to one side and reached the brandy snifters. “God, these are dusty.”
“Guest passes for the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA sends a couple with our new cards every year when we renew our membership.” She took the first two snifters.
“Don’t you need them?” I asked as I passed down another pair.
“Why would we? We get in with our own cards.”
I had to shuffle a few more beer glasses to reach the last of the snifters. “Well, to take
friends. Or Dan when he’s home from school. Looks like I only have five of these. We must have broken one at some point.” I handed her the last snifter and then a cordial glass. “I can use this instead.”
Kate put the last glasses on the counter. “We can take friends in with us on our cards at our membership level. Not that we ever do. Shall we rinse these out?” And she held the chair steady for me to climb down safely. “We could have taken you in that day if we’d known you were coming. They charge so damn much.”
“Well, it’s not like I can’t afford it,” I said, taking the first two glasses over to the sink and wondering if that sounded defensive.
“Of course not,” she replied, bringing two more. “But why pay if you don’t have to?” She put the glasses down and returned for the last ones. “Spend the money in the gift shop instead. It’s a lot more fun.”
“Oh yeah? I’ll have to check it out. I didn’t leave myself enough time that Saturday.” And I began to wash the glasses out.
“A towel?” Kate asked.
“That drawer there.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment, but then, as she wiped the second snifter, Kate
said, “You know, Jason really felt bad about that day at the museum. You left so quickly he thought you must be mad at him about something.”
“No, not at all,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I’d been annoyed, but not angry.
“He didn’t mean anything by what he said. He was just surprised to see you there.” “Because I live in the suburbs and have no culture?” I hoped it sounded like a joke.
Kate moved on to the third glass. “Because we go there pretty often and we’ve never run
into any one we know there before. Course it’s usually so crowded half his office could be there and we’d miss all of them.”
I didn’t reply, just sort of grunted an acknowledgment. Then after a minute she said, “He also said that he would have thought it more likely to run into you at the Met.”
“The opera?”
“God no!” Kate giggled as she finished the fourth glass. “Jason hates the opera.”
“So do I,” I admitted. I finished washing the last glass and turned off the water.
Kate was still drying the fifth. “He thought the Metropolitan Museum was more your cup
of tea. Old masters and all that.”
“Oh yeah?” I grabbed another clean towel from the drawer to dry that last glass. “The
Met? I haven’t been there in ages.”
And with the glasses now sparkling, the conversation ended as we rejoined the others in
the living room.
It wasn’t until my brothers and their wives had left and I was putting the brandy snifters
into the dishwasher and saw the guest passes still sitting on the counter that I remembered the conversation and Kate’s last comment, that Jason would have thought it more likely that I would be found visiting the Metropolitan Museum. I hadn’t been there in years, not because I’d come to prefer modern art to the older stuff, but because it was a longer trek from Penn Station. But of course Jason would think of the older museum in connection with me. The first time he had ever visited it, the first time either of us had ever visited it, I had taken him.
It was my senior year at college and I had been halfway through a two-semester course on art history, one of my last electives. The professor had suggested that anyone living near a decent art museum should pay it a visit over the Christmas break, see actual paintings instead of slides.
I, along with almost every other female student in the class, had had a bit of a crush on Professor Billings, and if he’d suggested fasting over the two-week vacation, or copying Vasari’s Lives of the Artists out in longhand, I might well have given it a shot. A museum visit? Of course I would go. And since we were only up to the Baroque period, of course I was going to visit the Met, not MoMA.
But when I announced my plans at Christmas dinner, twelve-year-old Jason had begged to come along. I’d been surprised, not expecting a twelve-year-old boy to be interested in anything beyond football stats and Star Trek. But I’d agreed.
My mother took me aside after dinner. “Keep an eye on him,” she told me. “He thinks he’s a lot more street-smart that he really is, and he’ll try and dump you and go off on his own. Probably wants to go down to Greenwich Village and look for hippies or something.”
I gave my word, and sure enough, we’d no sooner gotten off the train the next morning when Jason tried to blow me off, claiming his friends had all come into the city on an earlier train and they had plans to meet up. It might have been true, but I doubted it, and I kept a firm grip on his elbow and steered him to the crosstown bus to catch the uptown bus to the museum.
“You’re not my mother!” he’d whined.
“Thank god!” I’d snapped back.
But to our mutual surprise he’d actually enjoyed the museum. I gave myself credit at the
time for having had the brainstorm to start him out with the suits of armor and then the mummies before moving on to the Renaissance art I wanted to see. But now, looking back, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was a natural art connoisseur just finding his groove. And maybe I was being paranoid now, thinking he was subtly mocking me by showing off his knowledge of and taste for the really new stuff. Maybe he was just trying, however awkwardly, to share his enthusiasm like I’d shared mine years before.
I fell asleep formulating a plan to invite Jason to visit the Met with me when I got back from my mother-in-law’s after Christmas. I’d even let him lecture me in the modern art galleries. He’d like that.
The Metropolitan Museum was the last thing on my mind as I fell asleep, but when I dreamed, it was the Museum of Modern Art I dreamed of.
I was using one of the guest passes Kate had given me. I walked up the stairs to the second floor in the middle of a crowd of other visitors. Around the corner, on the second floor, the museum has a big open space, stretching up several floors, a sort of atrium. Across this atrium, across from the entrance I had just come through in my dream, is the entrance to the galleries where I had seen the Santana piece the last time I had been there in waking life. So in the dream it seemed perfectly natural to see those witches of “Waiting for Macbeth” grown to life-size and having come alive. They processed out of that gallery, pushing their teacup- cauldron, also grown in size, in front of them. Once they had reached the center of the atrium they lit the can of Sterno and gathered round it. Museum goers gathered in a large circle around them to watch, me included.
Soon the contents of the teacup began to bubble and send up clouds of steam. It took me a minute to place the fragrance. It smelled like wet paint and turpentine.
“Where are the others?” the first witch asked. Her voice was like silverware rattling in a slammed drawer.
“They come,” said the second.
“They arrive,” said the third.
I heard a sound behind me and I stepped back, out of the atrium, to see Matisse’s dancers,
also come to life and moving like water in a stream, flowing over from the direction of the escalators to the upper floors. They passed by me and joined the weird sisters.
“And the others?” asked the first witch. “Three and five is but eight.”
“They come,” said the second witch.
“They arrive,” said the third.
I looked back towards the escalators again, but Picasso’s demoiselles came instead from
the elevators on the other side of the museum, moving jerkily on their angular legs. Two of them gave me hard stares as they passed by but they too joined the inner circle around the cauldron.
“Thirteen,” said the first witch with evident satisfaction.
“The coven is complete,” said the second.
“Let us begin,” said the third.
The witches, the demoiselles, the dancers, all joined hands and began to circle the teacup-
cauldron counterclockwise. They were chanting something but I couldn’t make it out. And then that one slightly clumsy dancer of Matisse’s stumbled again, lost her grip on the hand of the demoiselle she was following, and what had been a circle became a sort of line. The group did not break off their dance however. They simply continued on, widening the radius of their open- ended circle. They snaked round and round the atrium in an ever-widening spiral, the clumsy dancer in the lead. The spectators all fell back, then fled into the surrounding areas of the museum. But, as often happens in dreams, my legs wouldn’t work. I stood watching, rooted in place, not exactly frightened but apprehensive.
On the widest turn of the spiral, the front of the line reached me, and the whole group stopped. The chanting stopped. I stared at the thirteen of them and they all stared back. Then that first dancer said something. Her voice was like music but I didn’t know what she was saying. In the dream, though, I knew she must be speaking French, and I could tell from the intonation that she was asking me a question. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I told her.
She turned and said something to the dancer behind her and some comment flowed down the line like the message in a child’s game of telephone until it reached the witches in the middle of the group. They let go the hands of the others and came forward to confront me.
“We change no past,” said the first witch.
“We foretell no future,” said the second.
And then, sounding exactly like my brother Jason, the third witch asked, “So, Alicia,
what are you doing here?”
“Looking at art,” I said. “What else would I be doing here? Looking at art and trying to
understand it.”
The third witch nodded her spoon head and turned to her sisters. Her voice again like the
clatter of forks and knives, she said, “She seeks a spell, an enchantment.”
“That we can do,” said the second.
“Can we not, Sisters?” said the first, turning to the rest of the group.
A chorus of assents sounded. The witches, the dancers, the whores all joined hands
again, reforming the line, and as they moved on, the last of Picasso’s demoiselles offered me her hand. My legs unfroze. If I had not been able to move before, now I could not not move. I took the offered hand, and with me at the tail end of the line, the fourteen of us danced on. We danced through the atrium and into the galleries, up and down the stairs, all through the museum, looking at art, until I woke up.
THE END